Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius. Dill Samuel

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       Samuel Dill

      Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius

      Published by Good Press, 2020

       [email protected]

      EAN 4064066101800

Table of Contents

       PREFACE

       BOOK I.

       INFESTA VIRTUTIBUS TEMPORA

       CHAPTER I

       THE ARISTOCRACY UNDER THE TERROR

       CHAPTER II

       THE WORLD OF THE SATIRIST

       CHAPTER III

       THE SOCIETY OF THE FREEDMEN

       BOOK II

       RARA TEMPORUM FELICITAS

       CHAPTER I

       THE CIRCLE OF THE YOUNGER PLINY

       CHAPTER II

       MUNICIPAL LIFE

       CHAPTER III

       THE COLLEGES AND PLEBEIAN LIFE

       BOOK III.

       NEC PHILOSOPHIA SINE VIRTUTE EST NEC SINE. PHILOSOPHIA VIRTUS

       CHAPTER I

       THE PHILOSOPHIC DIRECTOR

       CHAPTER II

       THE PHILOSOPHIC MISSIONARY

       CHAPTER III

       THE PHILOSOPHIC THEOLOGIAN

       BOOK IV.

       ADSCENDENTIBUS DI MANUM PORRIGUNT

       CHAPTER I

       SUPERSTITION

       CHAPTER II

       BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY

       CHAPTER III

       THE OLD ROMAN RELIGION

       CHAPTER IV

       MAGNA MATER

       CHAPTER V

       ISIS AND SERAPIS

       CHAPTER VI

       THE RELIGION OF MITHRA

       INDEX

      "

PREFACE

       Table of Contents

      There must always be something arbitrary in the choice and isolation of a period of social history for special study. No period can, from one point of view, be broken off and isolated from the immemorial influences which have moulded it, from the succession of coming ages which it will help to fashion. And this is specially true of the history of a race at once so aggressive, yet so tenacious of the past, as the Roman. The national fibre was so tough, and its tone and sentiment so conservative under all external changes, that when a man knows any considerable period of Roman social history, he may almost, without paradox, be said to know a great deal of it from Romulus to Honorius.

      Yet, as in the artistic drama there must be a beginning and an end, although the action can only be ideally severed from what has preceded and what is to follow in actual life, so a limited space in the collective history of a people may be legitimately set apart for concentrated study. But as in the case of the drama, such a period should possess a certain unity and intensity of moral interest. It should be a crisis and turning-point in the life of humanity, a period pregnant with momentous issues, a period in which the old order and the new are contending for mastery, or in which the old is melting into the new. Above all, it should be one in which the great social and spiritual movements are incarnate in some striking personalities, who may give a human interest to dim forces of spiritual evolution.

      Such a period, it seems to the writer of this book, is that [pg vi]which he now presents to the reader. It opens with the self-destruction of lawless and intoxicated power; it closes with the realisation of Plato’s dream of a reign of the philosophers. The revolution in the ideal of the principate, which gave the world a Trajan, a Hadrian, and a Marcus Aurelius in place of a Caligula and a Nero, may not have been accompanied by any change of corresponding depth in the moral condition of the masses. But